The Dream Solution: The Murder of Alison Shaughnessy - and the Fight to Name Her Killer

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My dream solution would be for Alison to disappear as if she never existed and then maybe I could give everything to the man I loved. After that, the sisters would have had to park the car, and Michelle would have had to compose herself so thoroughly that not even close associates could detect anything untoward in her manner. At six that evening, Michelle went with John, as she often did, to arrange flowers in the patients’ rooms. Michelle made friends again with both of them and when they were married in Ireland in the summer of 1990, she went to the wedding.

One of those who initially campaigned for the Taylors' release, Bernard O'Mahoney, later admitted he had intimidated witnesses to build up the defence case. Their father ran a small cleaning business, so they had the equipment, and they needed the extra cash. But the press had latched onto Crompton’s original remarks; his subsequent repudiation was not thought worthy of attention and so the Taylors’ strongest line of defence – the fact that aside from the fingerprint, there was no forensic evidence against them, although in the circumstances there ought to have been a great deal – was underplayed in the influential publicity surrounding the trial. Michelle met John Shaughnessy in 1989 at the Churchill clinic in Lambeth, south London, where they both worked. There was some speculation after the trial that the killing could have been influenced by the 1987 film Fatal Attraction, in which a married man has a weekend affair with a woman who refuses to allow it to end and becomes obsessed with him.It was said that she was obviously infatuated with Alison Shaughnessy's husband and that she hated Alison Shaughnessy. However, by both Michelle's and Mr Shaughnessy's accounts their relationship was 'nothing if not dead' by the time that Alison was killed. Bob Woffinden, an investigative journalist who campaigned to free prisoners he thought were wrongly imprisoned, such as James Hanratty (posthumously proven to have been guilty) and the killer of Helen McCourt, claimed they must be innocent because he posited that it was a highly unusual case and two women could not have carried out the murder. Michelle, 22, and her sister, Lisa, 19, had served nearly two years in prison for murder before they emerged yesterday from the Court of Appeal, pale, shocked and stunned, to a tumultuous welcome to freedom.

Michelle organised and paid for his stag night and Mr Shaughnessy invited her to the wedding in Ireland as 'his guest' and paid for her flight and hotel. Bernard, having witnessed their trial, was convinced that a major miscarriage of justice had occurred and with his help their appeal was successful. However, when police approached him again on 4 August, he said that he had, after all, seen two girls running down the steps from the Shaughnessys’ flat, with a man behind them. But a month later Miss Tapp was arrested for conspiring to murder Mrs Shaughnessy and immediately withdrew the statements. Michelle's diary included an entry that read: "My dream solution would be for Alison to disappear, as if she never existed.They went to school, went out dancing, went to work, planned to get married one day and never threatened for a moment to break out of the obvious course which life had planned for them. As the Court of Appeal was told, while ignorance and confusion may have been used as an excuse for not revealing evidence during the miscarriages of justice of the 1970s and 1980s, by the time of the Taylor sisters' Old Bailey trial last year there can have been no doubts.

The defence, however, claimed that this showed that the Taylors could not have been the two women who carried out the murder and said this should have been presented at the trial. However, there was no sign of a break-in, and she had taken time to pick up the post as she came in, suggesting to police that she felt comfortable with her killer(s) as they came in with her. Sitting in the cafe, there was a man in the phone box and he looked like one of the CIDs and she went white…By her conversation, she has lied in court and she is frightened.Suspicion falls on her husband's lover and her sister, but are they getting a fair trial when the media is whipped up i.

There was also evidence from Michele’s diary where she had written “my dream solution would be for Alison to disappear, as if she never existed. Incredibly, having served less than one year of their sentences, the Taylor sisters were freed thanks to an exhaustive campaign by Bernard O'Mahoney. She gave an accurate description of what Alison had been wearing and told the police that she must have come in after six, because the Six O’clock News had already started on the BBC. The Sun newspaper issued a statement in defence of their coverage of the Taylor sisters murder trial: "Lord Justice McCowan accuses us of sensational reporting.The Taylor sisters were found guilty of the murder in 1992, but one year later their convictions were overturned by the Court of Appeal because the prosecution had failed to turn evidence over to the defence, and because the sensationalist media coverage may have influenced jurors. To reach home, she would have walked to the bus-stop, taken a bus to Waterloo, then a train to Clapham Junction, and walked to her flat. His evidence was crucial because he was the only one to put the two women at the scene at the material time. However, the friend who had given them their alibi, later told the pol Later that evening, John was given a lift home from the Churchill Clinic to the flat in Vardens Road by Michelle Taylor.